Which chipset sets the record? Simple - it depends

Mercury Research have posted the results of extensive testing of the Pentium III-733 and the AMD-Athlon 700 on The Meter. Mercury analyst and Meter Editor Mike Feibus declares that Intel and AMD are in "a war for the PC performance crown".

Despite the accuracy and depth of the study, it looks like the war is far from settled. While the Pentium clearly won out in synthetic tests, the Athlon actually edged it in a few of the game tests.

One possible inaccuracy in the study comes from the use of the older DirectX6.1 on the Athlon tests and the use of version 7.0 for the Pentium. Due to the nature of 7.0, the "performance on existing games is a little worse". Worse? How can that be? It seems that version 7.0 focused on adding some new features and that compromised system speed. If you'd like to know more, check out the Half-Life and Quake III Arena Test trials here.


Courtesy of IGN.com